‘More romantic, elegant, deep’: why Americans love Real Girlfriends in Paris
Concealing ranch dressing in your handbag, worrying about the carbs in la soupe, wondering if you’ll ever find a French lover who likes to Netflix and chill: here are just a few of the new world-old world challenges the protagonists face in the first episode of Real Girlfriends in Paris, a reality TV show with its debut on 6 September on Hayu and Bravo.
As one may presume from the title of the show, the programme follows six American women in their 20s and 30s, looking for meaning, for a change and, are adrift in “the most beautiful city in the world … a fairytale” – that is, an enchanted, heavily Disneyfied and filtered vision of France, which features the women performing Parisian-ness to a T: drinking wine round the clock, wearing trenchcoats and berets, eating crepes, loudly discussing sex. A choice of cliches so familiar and vivid that local press immediately labelled it “the reality TV version of Emily in Paris”, with French Elle declaring it “directly inspired” by Darren Star’s comedy drama. What do the two have in common? Both shows are seen, by the French media, as a “guilty pleasure” that “one loves hating” – for their glorious inaccuracy (Paris limited to a handful of bridges and mimes, emaciated women smoking in turtle necks, not to mention an entire alcoholic population).
